Daniel Yon Explains Why Your Brain Is a Brilliant Illusionist | Scientific American

September 12, 2025

How Your Brain Constructs—And Sometimes Distorts—Your Experience of the World

 In his new book, Daniel Yon explains how our brain is constantly constructing reality

By Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura

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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.

You probably think you’re listening to my voice right now. But what if I told you that you’re actually experiencing a sophisticated hallucination?

Perception isn’t the passive process that most of us imagine it to be, with our senses simply recording reality and sending it up to our brains for processing. Instead, our brains are constantly constructing theories about what’s going on around us—and sometimes our brains get reality wrong.

Here to explain this mind-bending way of looking at, well, the mind, is Daniel Yon, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Daniel is also the author of a recent book called A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality.

Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us.

Daniel Yon: Thank you for having me.

Feltman: So why don’t you start by telling me a little bit about your background and how it led you to write your latest book.

Yon: Yeah, so I’m an experimental psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist, so that means my day job is to try and understand how your mind and brain work and how what happens inside your skull kind of makes the world that you live in.

So the motivation behind my new book, A Trick of the Mind, is that I think that the work that’s been going on in my lab and that which colleagues have been working on around the world gives us a brand-new way of thinking about how our brains work: that your brain is like a scientist. And I think this new idea …

Feltman: Hmm.

Yon: Can shed a lot of light on both the wonderful things [laughs] that your brain gets right but also the ways that our minds and brains can mislead us and get us to perceive and believe things that may not be true.

Feltman: Right. So you, you say that our brains are constantly hallucinating reality and that this is “a feature, not a bug.” Can you explain more what that means for our listeners?

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